They apply in their thousands, lured by the promise of the ultimate summer of a lifetime. No longer just the land of opportunity, the US is every Irish student's favourite playground and this year it seems everybody wants to play.

Ten days since the doors of USIT Now opened for students interested in travelling to the US on the Student Work and Travel programme, almost 7,000 of the 7,500 places have been snapped up. The queues of students may have diminished but over the next seven days the rest of the J1-Visitor visas are expected to go.

Meanwhile, 750 places allocated to those wishing to go on the programme a second time were taken in just one day. Ms Aideen Masterson, of USIT Now, describes the interest as "phenomenal". "Usually the take-up of applications is spread over a longer period," she says.

The programme has been hugely popular since the idea of third-level students being allowed to work and travel legally in the US for a summer was introduced in 1964, but now the reasons for going have changed. With the booming economy, students could just as easily find summer work for the same money closer to home, but they go to the US more for the cultural exchanges than the monetary gain - and the pressure to earn is no longer as great because they do not have to earn college fees.

"A few years ago, earnings would have been the priority, now it is more about life experience and adventure. Last year, 86 per cent of students managed to spend time holidaying and the average number of states they saw was four," says Ms Masterson.

The most popular destinations are the east coast but an increasing number are going further afield, to Alaska and Hawaii.

Ronan Hand (22), from Foxrock, Co Dublin, is a student at Trinity College Dublin and spent last summer in New York working as a doorman. "In terms of the range of experiences it surpassed my expectations . . . I had all these notions about what America was and the trip gave me new avenues of experience," he says.

He described the New York experience as "quite surreal at first, like being in a collage of television programmes except you can smell it all and feel the heat".

The Usit Now programme provides a way for people to learn from others' mistakes, he believes. Arriving at Columbia University, where students flying into New York stay on their first night, the students were "freshfaced and full of optimism".

Though it has been maligned in the past, 72 per cent of students questioned for last year's Usit Now survey said the orientation programme provided on arrival by Usit Now and their US partners, Council, was helpful.

However, not everyone is as enamoured with it. One mature student who travelled on the programme was irritated that she had to do it at all, saying she could have got to her intended destination just as cheaply, if not more cheaply, independently.

"Instead, I found myself on a plane to New York full of young students and had no choice but to stay in a hostel overnight so that I could be `inducted' the next day. The induction involved telling us how to behave in this new culture, how not to talk to strangers, how not to get involved in drunken brawls and how the police were likely to treat us if we did," she says. At the age of 58, she found this information "somewhat superfluous".

Architecture student Anna Ryan (22), from Dalkey, Co Dublin, spent the summer in Hawaii as a windsurfing instructor. Kailua's white sandy beach was my office, she wrote later, its warm clear waters my classroom.

Her choice of destination came from Scandinavian architect, Jorn Utzon, who designed the Sydney Opera House. He once said he got inspiration for his work from lying on the beach looking at the clouds in Hawaii. The highlight for Anna was seeing flowing lava on one of the islands but overall, she says, "it was a great chance to immerse yourself in a totally different culture."

The most treasured experiences of students who travel, many for the first time, to every corner of the US can be glimpsed in an extract of Ronan Hand's winning entry for the Encounter USA Student Travel Awards, run by USIT Now and Aer Lingus. Anna Ryan also received an award.

"Whenever I stood at the end of the last carriage on the N train, it made me the last passenger on that train to leave Manhattan. I had a tape of taiko drumming in my walkman. As the train emerged from under the river and into Queens, I would sometimes stand up and press my face up against the window. Swaying back and forth and side to side with the shaking floor, I watched the Queensboro bridge snaking away into Manhattan. Then Manhattan could look like a beautiful backdrop again, against which magical stories take place" he wrote.

Let the adventure begin.